Dr_Mechano

((a Unionverse RP thread, half a whimsical story...half RP...so you must be or have a character in the Unionverse in order to respond)).

Dr Edward Johnson aka the infamous Dr Mechano took in a deep breath, drawing air through the crackling tobaco of his new pipe. He had decided that perhaps a pipe would make him look more distinguished...all the best scientists of that bygone era of discovery smoked pipes so perhaps it had been time for him to start. He was reading the Rogue Isles Protector...his favorite paper and it had front page splashes of the fights that had raged in the three contested zones.

"I've been out the loop too long it seems," his mechanical hand flexing, "it appears people have gone and had a war without me...how terribly inconvient..."

Edward laid down his pipe and moved to sip his tea and ponder for a while.

"Seems like the New World Order has succeeded in dealing quite a few blows to the heroes...and after I'd sent that lovely peace offering to Countess Elizabeth perhaps I should stay my hand...after all who wants to enrage that little lot again..."

He gave a grin and scratched his beard, "however I cannot let the flush of success make them overconfident...I have proven they're not untouchable once before but it doing the same thing again would simply be a tad boring...no, perhaps it's time to shake things up a bit, try something new."

Edward set down the paper, "the question is what...normally I go with the first idea that comes into my head but this requires something big, something extravagant, something that will top everything I've planned previously, just to let people know I'm still here and still watching, ready to strike down the unwary and the overconfident..."

He was very much on his own when it came to the villain community, all the major groups considered him something of a 'wild card' prone to drawing a lot of attention for all the wrong reason and prone to being someone that alliances with lasted as long as his attention was entertained by them.

"I need secrets, big secrets, in order to reveal...this new group led by that blustering Arachnos official...what was it...Purple Guard...it was a colour anyway...do represent a problem.."

Edward stood up from his chair and wandered downstairs to his lab, dusting off the old inventing table, a spanner in his hand, staring at it as if it were to will an idea into his mind.

"The Arbiters are untoucable...beyond reproach...so while I cannot target him I'm sure I could sully the name of someone in his little group...someone must have secrets they cannot hide..."

He offered a smile to his remarkably silent chatting companion, "ooh..thank you Steve...I would forget my head if it wasn't screwed on..." liberating his cup of tea from his companion, kind enough to bring it to the Doctor from upstairs.

"Hmm perhaps I am not the one that can find these secrets...however there are always good spies available for hire...Steve, take notes, I want you to place this advert in the Rogue Isles Protector.

Steve, perhaps it should be said, remained silent for he was a cybernetically enhanced Shivan, the Doctor's assistant and bodyguard when he was not with his robotic family. However Steve had taken a remarkable shine to the position, he couldn't talk but he could type, updating his Myspace blog Shivan Steve Types! every so often about musings on working with the good Doctor and being a Shivan who goes shopping.

So begun the dictation of the advert, "Wanted, exclamation mark, those of an investigative nature to do very, underline very and make it bold, background checks on prospective employees, full stop. Pay is based on results, full stop. Contact is to be through PO Box number 125 in Port Oakes, full stop."

"Place that advert and we shall hope we get some of the better investigative criminals in the Isles...oh and place it in the Paragon Times to...we may as well get some of thos conspiracy theorist nut heroes working for us as well ahey Steve?"

The Shivan nodded and lumbered off to post the advert in the respective newspapers.

"Smart boy that Steve, play the piano amazingly, who knew Shivans could play the piano..." the doctor muttered to himself as he took another sip of his earl grey tea.

((those looking to play people who would answer the advert, both hero or villain, should respond on this thread, once I have talked with the respective leaders of the Corporation, the Krimzon Guard, and the Court of the Blood countess. I will pass you the information through means of PM's...you are free to do with the information your character discovers as you wish...send it on to Mechano or use it for your own gain. If you wish to volunteer you villain group to have their secrets revealed, please speak up!))

Yeah like that makes it any better...

Actually...for once...a very good point GG.

GG, making a decent point, I'm actually quite scared, think that's a sign of the Forumpocalypse, quick call the horsemen!

Recluse and Arachnos are, to be brutally honest, kind of one dimensional villains, they do their thing 'for the evilulz' and there's very little motive to them apart from that. Recluse has his whole 'strongest prevail' schtick going on but it's pretty much just an excuse to keep Mercy a dive.

Emperor Cole/Tyrant (depending on your choices) does allow for more scope. The classic 'is doing something evil for the greater good of mankind really that evil?' issue crops up and there's lots of ways you can toy with just that one idea.

Hmm certainly going to be interesting especially if Arachnos Soldiers/Widows are allowed to change sides, presents a real dilemma if they're the 'For Recluse!' type personality.

"Recluse is clearly superior to this...Statesman knockoff but if I choose to help the other side I'd be going against the law of Recluse, that only the strong should survive and the rebels are clearly too weak to strike out on their own...but if I bow before Tyrant I'm bowing to a cheap dimensional ripoff of that goody-toe shoes over the waters in Paragon...I didn't bow to Reicshman or Imperious I'm certainly not going to do the same for Tyrant...so which path do I choose in order to best serve Recluse?"

Most of them do when I create them but then I (as asked above) start out with a very detailed concept in mind before starting, I'll mull over a characters costume for hours however because the concept may be good but the look isn't just right.

Varrickette (my Night Widow) came alive for me now I've got her nearly completely IO'd out, she's a lean, mean killing machine and taking on massive mobs on the -1 x8 makes her feel all the more like an unstoppable killing machine.

Managed to get Unstoppabubble on Union :P

hmm...make it a yearly reward, make it so if you've already got a costume power it wont randomly award one you already have (like since I managed to snag the two carnie costume codes in the competition thread, I wont get awarded either of those when I do random roll)...and I'd sign this!

There's a new AT, the Walkie-talkie toaster. They're technology origin. Primary power is muffin assault, secondary powers are toast armour. They have the inherent "would you like a piece of Toast?" which causes all their primary powers to have a chance of causing confusion or anger in their targets.

Their small statue is already factored and they get a +10% bonus on any defense based buffs...

In actually answer to the questioned question...we have no idea...we could get the Spy AT or we could get nowt...I'm hoping for the Walkie-Talkie toaster AT for bother sides though.

Actually City of Heroes isn't really 'bot friendly' for the very same reasons the game isn't even listed on the 'big name' gold seller sites (notice how it's the "we'll definitely steal your credit card info to buy accounts" small fry that target CoH but never the corporatized big guys?), it's not profitable for them in the slightest when there's that big old gorilla sitting in the corner which they can make a hundred times more money off of.

Even our epicest of loots is gotten through the most mundane of means. Most CoH players are intelligent enough to know that purples are required for high recharge builds and...that's about it (since that's all purples do REALLY well). One single purple drop however can make a player able to almost completely outfit their character in top of the range non-purple IOs.

One purple IO (Ragnarok) bought my Night Widow:
2 complete sets of Mako's bite.
1 complete set of Touch of Death.
1 complete set of Red fortune.
1 complete set of Serendipity.
1 res/def Steadfast IO (which I could have farmed the AE for tickets and rolled on level 10-19 bronze recipes if I didn't "WANT IT NOWZ!").
1 Complete set of Thunderstrike...
...and enough funds to generally be well off for generic IOs for those powers I'm not fussed about IOing up immedieatly. All at the 'I must have it now!" prices, if I'd have been patient I probably could have spent half the money getting it all but...well inf burns a hole in my virtual pocket.

There's very little that's out of reach of the common player that can't be gotten by a little hard work and sheer dumb luck. To RMT sites this is the bane of their existence since there's no 'work' or 'grind' needed, you just play the game, as you do, killing mobs and boom it drops into your lap.

Nobody in CoH is 'poor' Heck i just made 4 million selling my drops and recipes at level 45 in the space of...about two hours...

On the US servers I made 400 million just by using the AE and farming that wall of Romans in a WEEK of work playing 2-3 hours a day...

We even have guides which tell people how to amass large sums of wealth easily with very little play time...which is something the WoW community would never do since their marketeers tend to be as secretive as possible because the competition is so much more vast and numerous.

Now compare that to most fantasy MMOs have massive 'gold sinks', lets take an examples from ye olde World of Warcraft...

Mechano-hog bike and sidecar engineer created mount: Not only do you have to 'grind rep' in order to have access to the plans but a large chunk of the parts needed, unlike most Engineering recipes (which just used materials which were stupidly rare to make their cost something big) can only be bought from NPCs, now when you total up the basic cost of those parts PLUS the already incredibly expensive materials you can farm from the open world it came to around 20,000 gold.

Let me put it this way, a person who doesn't play the market (which takes substantially more time and effort in WoW to make a decent profit than it does in City of Heroes) like myself spent a MONTH worth of grinding specific mobs for high priced drops AND doing repeatable daily quests for like 5-6 hours a day to earn 5,000 gold to earn my epic flying lessons.

Imagine what it takes and how long it takes to earn 20k gold for most people now? Blizzard sit there and make items like this and go "dduuurrr...why do people use RMT sites?! It make no sense!"

Blizzard you stupid fools your bought it on yourself...random bind on equip epics being expensive...well duh...they're RARE just like purple IOs are RARE but most of them are affordable with a little under two weeks casual work (that and they're normally outclassed by epic heroic dungeon loot anyway...most of which only take an hour or so).

You go and create expensive prestige items and wonder why the hell people shortcut the long grind to get them by buying gold from RMT sites? Because you made a novelty item that people want so ridiculously expensive you either had to be a market guru or work your backside off for MONTHS to get it...

People will take shortcuts.

As for the actual question...no...back in WoW I would have probably said yes...but here...even if I could...I honestly don't see the point..

Plus there are other non-NCsoft hosted websites which allow for discussions of what was seen in closed Beta if one knows where to look. Of course said websites don't actually have any info since closed beta hasn't started yet.

Still if you get caught breaking the NDA it's your own damn fault...just warning you people!

well the dialogue options are already there...except the civillian to first see you after doing your 'thang' in a mission will go "Did you hear about [character name] busting up the [enemy group]?" for a generic defeat boss radio mission.

Not sure how much work it would be to make a civilian re-reference your last mission when you clicked the chat option...

I do a 'character by request' kind of service.

My namesake and Mad Scientist par excellence Dr Mechano has a very profitiable business creating 'dream partners' for rich folk through genetic and chemical manipulation, grown to full maturity using accelerated growth tanks (which also give the subconscious brain all the teaching it needs to be able to speak, breath and all those other things required in day to day life).

The 'dream partners' thing is only a side of that, he actually makes more money off of the even more illegal trade of creating super powered loyal bodyguards for various villains and villain groups.

The prototype was created but turned into a hero (ss/invuln tanker) she still refers to the doctor as her 'dad' and visits him during the various holidays. One was patterned after a friends characters arch-nemesis in his VG (mad scientist and serious Arachnos command do not get along), so he wanted a subservant female version to humilate said nemesis and supplied the genetic material, however she didn't turn out right and was just as insulting and bitterly sarcastic as her source.

So while those two know Dr Mechano, they don't know of each other.

Soldiers get their status protection from their level 1 armour (wolf, Crab or Spider) while not as good as a melee class status protection it's more than any other ranged damage dealer.

Soldiers also get decent level of protection from things like Weave (6% defence), they can also take Maneuvers TWICE (own version which offers 12% defence and the power pool version which offers 6%) which gives them a total of 24% defence, then they get their tactical training defence which is another 7-8% or so making 31-32% defence which is about equal to SR.

Widows (including Fortunatas) get a copy of Indomitable will in addition to their SR level defenses.

A large group of friends is actually interesting in doing an ALL VEAT LRSF just to see how things would go.

Even if the rule of "if an AV has 100% resistance to it, -res debuffs don't work on that resistance" an 'even split' VEAT team of 2 of each of the branches has enough non-smashing/lethal damage to usually make up for it (All night Widow claw attacks deal toxic DoT as do 90% of Bane Spider attacks, Fortunatas are all psi damage which almost no AV has any decent resistance to and Crabs deal Smashing/energy or have a toxic effect on their ranged).

more stats on the All huntsman team and a very major factor.

While an all huntsman team lacks -regen when dealing with AVs (though you would think +240% damage all the time would be more than enough to counter AV regen) just incase that wasn't enough if they take the two powers with -res in it they top out at a whopping -320% damage resistance which is one of the two effects AVs offer no resistance to and is basically enough to floor any AVs resistance.

I once did a 7 man VEAT +1 Bots/Traps mastermind Renault Strikeforce (was a mixture of Crabs, Banes Night widows and Fortunatas) which resulted in the entire team being hit a grand total of about three times (the Leviathan managed to hit one of the Crab spiders abd the mass of coralax managed to get past the defenses) during the entire final encounter with the Leviathan eye and the mass coralax that spawned.

gah I meant hardcap not softcap *facepalms* I know the softcap is 45%, what I get for not paying that much attention to my typing!

stick me in the "oh...the build up was for that?!" camp.

A slightly tweaked Rikti invasion event, meh, I'll be brutally honest here and say they would have done themselves a hell of a lot more favours if they hadn't of teased about it and hyped it up but just outright came out a said what was going to happen a week ago. People probably wouldn't be so dang hostile.

All the teasing did nothing but build hype since most Rikti invasions just get announced meaning people were leaning more towards the "it could be but why all the hype then?" slant of things.

Sorry Niv and the rest of the crew, the gesture is greatly appreciated but you kind of shot yourself in the foot when you went all cryptic clues on us.

correct me if I'm wrong but weren't none of the EU servers 'scanned' an only Virtue and one other US server?

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.